Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: An escape artist in a post-apocalyptic circus must conceive of an act that includes his child, or risk them both being exiled to certain death.
I wrote this in one weekend for challenge #3 of the NYC Midnight Short Screenplay Challenge (2010). The writers in my heat had to write a sci-fi short featuring a nuclear warhead . The location for the short: a circus.
The beauty of NYC Midnight is that you can get a genre you dislike one round, and then get a genre that you love the next. The danger is that you can get lulled into a false sense of comfort when you finally get your genre. As a result, you might (subconsciously) not put forth the same effort you would for a more challenging set of parameters.
Adversity breeds creativity. Comfort breeds complacency.
The parameters of this challenge took me straight to a sci-fi subgenre that I absolutely love: post-apocalyptic. Once I was there, the script wrote itself.
The Greatest Show (Left) on Earth is rife with imagery. I’ve seen enough dystopian films over the years that, with a little help from the Nick Cave / Warren Ellis score for The Road, I was able to create a world that goes far beyond these five pages.
For as large as the world is, though, the story’s really about what lengths a father will go to in order to protect his son. The Greatest Show (Left) on Earth is another one of my favorites.
Download screenplay: The_Greatest_Show_(Left)_On_Earth
